This story was sent to me with the subject “Could someone PLEASE make up their minds???” True dat. I remember well after Hurricane Katrina that Mr. Gore and others very quickly began to blame the storm itself on global warming. Last year the UN climate change report stated that the warming of the oceans would increase the number and severity of hurricanes.

Oops.

Now researchers at NOAA are saying that the warming of the oceans will reduce the number of hurricanes that make landfall in the US.

Scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration analyzed Atlantic storms from 1854 to 2006. They found that higher ocean temperatures increase the vertical wind shear of a system, or the rate at which wind speeds vary with altitude, NOAA said in a statement on its Web site. That, in turn, correlated with a decrease in the number of storms that strike land.

“We found a gentle decrease in the trend of U.S. land- falling hurricanes when the global ocean is warmed up,” Chunzai Wang, an oceanographer at the center, said in the statement. “This trend coincides with an increase in vertical wind shear over the tropical North Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico.”